Available on

Wildsound Festival TV | Amazon FireTV

Mirtillo – numerus I, 1346. La peste nera è arrivata in Europa. Andruccio sta fuggendo dal suo villaggio di Coccorone (Italia) in cerca di salvezza. Tra boschi e sentieri incontra un personaggio piuttosto singolare che lo accompagnerà a Triora, il “villaggio delle streghe”, per trovare la cura. Un viaggio metafisico che porterà il protagonista a vivere un’esperienza unica tra sogno e realtà dove la morte diventerà la sua compagna di viaggio.

“However, Mirtillo carefully avoids running aground on an overloaded imagery, and instead aims to strip the story down, stripping away both the set design and the dialogues: what comes out is a small film that uses digital to outline its scenes like small paintings, succeeding in its intent to make the unreal seem normal.

Michelangelo Frammartino and a lot of postmodern cinema immediately comes to mind, but also-with a happy short-circuit-an Italian tradition of fairy tales and fairy tales: from the hanged man echoing Collodi to the characters in the woods that look closely at a lot of (good) seriality, Sweet Tooth but also Black Spot (with the myth of Cernunnos) and Yellowjacket.

Mirtillo, however, manages to contextualize everything in a meditative setting that transforms disquiet into estrangement, leaving the context clear of any form of anxiety and denying itself easy horror drifts. All this, however, is not ultimately matched even in the rhythm of the narrative, which-despite its few minutes-has some problems. The fact remains, however, that Sanzi has a happy eye and hand, and above all on his side the desire to explore roads little traveled in Italian cinema: along with the hope that in a longer more constructed length he will be able to put his decades of experience to good use and bring together all that is already good in his artistic world.”

Reviewed by Taxidrivers